Environmental activist says Missouri needs to embrace nuclear

An environmenal activist says nuclear energy is the safest, and cleanest, form of energy and promotes Missouri building another power plant.

Patrick Moore used to be the director of GreenPeace. He says environmental activicts should have embraced nuclear energy all along and there would be less coal dependency today.

Activists used to associate nuclear energy with nuclear bombs and war, he says, but in restrospect, that was the wrong way of thinking.

He’s known as ‘the sensible environmentalist,’ and says Three-mile Island, Chernobyl and even the current situation in Fukushima have not resulted in deaths like the coal industry. Even wind is not as safe, he says.

He says Missouri’s law that bans CWIP — construction work in progress — would cost utility customers more money in the end, that other states have realized this and have started paying rate increases now to boost available energy for later on, when a new facility comes online.

Moore says clean-burning coal is nothing more than a marketing concept, and that if Congress passed a law that all coal plants must sequester their CO2, no more coal plants would be built. He says nuclear is the clear answer.

Moore spoke to business and energy leaders from throughout the state a forum hosted by the Missouri Chamber of Commerce.

He is with the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, which he says is working to bring people at the municipal and state levels together to help convince the American public that nuclear energy is a key technology for the future … and that there should be a resurgence of this technology happening now if we want to reduce fossil fuel emissions.